How to Install a Centauron Node

This guide will walk you through setting up a complete Centauron node using the provided Ansible automation.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure the machine you are running the installation from (your local computer) has the following software installed:

Git: To clone the repository.
Python (version 3.8 or newer).
Ansible: The automation tool that runs the playbooks. You can follow the official Ansible installation guide.

The requirements for your remote machine are:

For doing computations, we recommend a dedicated machine with at least one GPU and shared storage with the Centauron installation.

We recommend to use different subdomains for the different components of your node:

Additionally, we require the following ports to be open-world accessible:

Furthermore we require the use of SSL certificates for each subdomain. This setup here uses Lets Encrypt for automatic certificate provisioning.

Clone the repository to your local machine to get all the necessary Ansible playbooks and roles.

bash

git clone https://github.com/TIGACenter/deploy-centauron.git deploy-centauron
cd deploy-centauron

You need to tell Ansible which server to connect to.

Open the inventory file: inventory/hosts.ini.

Add the IP address or domain name of your target server under the [all] group.

ini

[all]
your_server_ip_or_domain.com

All node-specific configuration is managed in a single file.

Open the main variable file: inventory/group_vars/all.yml.

Review and edit the variables as needed for your deployment. You can find a detailed description for each variable over here.

The installation process is automated and divided into two steps: 1) Install the prerequisites, 2) Configure the components.

From your terminal, run the following command to install the prerequisites necessary for your Centauron node:

bash

ansible-playbook prerequisites.yml

Configure the components using:

bash

ansible-playbook configure.yml

Start the components using:

bash

ansible-playbook start.yml